Lou Reed

Lou Reed authored his own life, too. He thought he wanted to be a journalist, but he became an artist, living outside the accepted lines of popular music of the day and in the margins of a New York City that he dove into and recorded. He shared what he saw, and what he imagined, in straightforward language set to music of spare chords, and always to the beat of his own drummer — his first, by the way, shattered further stereotypes by being a woman. Others coveted Top 40 hits; he aspired to more.

Upon his death over the weekend at age 71, some critics and pundits say Mr. Reed achieved that goal, reaching it through his music with the Velvet Underground in the 1960s and with a subsequent solo career, both of which earned posthumous commemoration from the gamut of media outlets and observers. In the end, Lou Reed’s passing was a mainstream headline. That’s how much he moved the cultural needle in his rule-defying lifetime.

A lot of America may not have wanted to buy what Mr. Reed was selling — if his biggest hit invited us to “Walk on the Wild Side,” he really did — but there is no doubt that his songs about all of life’s lovers and losers — including drug addicts, hustlers, abusers, the abused — opened up many new doors to what rock’n’roll could and would be; it and we became less narrow.

As others have noted, perhaps only Bob Dylan had as much impact on musicians whose careers came after his. In Mr. Reed’s case, his wake carried David Bowie, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, R.E.M, and many others.

He was known for the darkness of his music, and his themes, but the Long Island teen-ager who grew up watching Ozzie and Harriet to catch Ricky Nelson’s band at the end of the show can be heard in the buoyant rhythm of his anthem to finding something great on the radio, “Rock’n’Roll.”

Others left hits. Lou Reed left poetry, short stories, novels, chronicles of an unsettled and unsettling time of our national life ... along with something great on the radio.